NAS How To

Avahi and Netatalk Installation

Avahi is the open source implementation of what Apple calls Bonjour. It means that your new DIY Time Capsule will be advertised on your network and your Mac will know about it. So it’s good to install.

For Leopard and Snow Leopard, we need Netatalk 2.0.5 or above. However, in order to maintain compatibility with Lion we need version 2.2 or above for full AFP 3.3 support.

Debian Stable currently has version 2.1.2, which isn’t enough. But Debian Testing has 2.2 which is what we are after. So while our entire installation comes from the Stable repositories, we need to pick up Netatalk from the Testing repositories.

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

This will load the file up in a text editor called nano. Paste the following lines into the bottom

Note how we specify the txt-record to be TimeCapsule, so that we get the correct icon.

Again press control+o and control+x.

Now restart Netatalk and Avahi.

/etc/init.d/netatalk restart

/etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

Now check that your DIY Time Capsule is working. With a little luck, if you go back to your MacOS X machine in your side bar you will see a network machine called MyTimeCapsule with a little Time Capsule icon.

If you go into Time Machine, you should now be able to select the virtual machine.

Cleanup

I’m going to do a bit of cleanup of this virtual machine to reduce the size for downloading. This will remove different languages, manual pages and packages that we won’t need.

Create a Downloadable Appliance

Now make an appliance by selecting File: Export Appliance, which will result in a compressed .ova file that you can load into VirtualBox, as shown in Part 1.

It is interesting to note that the export actually creates .vmdk disks (the VMware format) instead of .vdi because the .ova format was created by VMware. However, it doesn’t really affect the outcome of this article.